Hi Colin,
Thanks for your reply and for clarifying that error message about my internet connection. I wondered if it had been something like that, but wanted to check anyway. The 'print-stats' option is enabled (or at least it's not commented out) in my 'tarsnap.conf' file. Are you saying that I also have to specify this option on the command line when I run tarsnap? Thanks for the info about stopping the archive running. I'd been using ^C,but will use ^Q from now on. Will use -v as an option also - thanks for that. Best wishes, John ## On 04-04-2014 18:43, Colin Percival wrote: > On 04/04/14 09:45, jg5 wrote: > >> 1). After the first backup session had (apparently) been running for several >> hours, I noticed the following message in the terminal window: tarsnap: >> Error looking up betatest-server.tarsnap.com: Name or service not known >> tarsnap: Using cached DNS lookup Does anyone know what that means? Did >> something go wrong? > > Your internet connection glitched. Tarsnap's connection to the server died, > and > it tried to perform another DNS lookup in case the server had changed > addresses; > that DNS lookup failed (due to said glitchy internet connection) so tarsnap > used > the result of the previous DNS lookup. If you didn't see any more errors after > this it means that your connection recovered within a few seconds. > > Nothing to worry about. > >> 2). How do you know that tarsnap actually *is* running OK? All I see in the >> terminal window is a blinking cursor. Apart from that, I don't know if the >> process is running correctly, if it has hung up or what. It would be nice to >> have some information about what's happening. > > Tarsnap, like all good UNIX software, operates quietly unless it has something > important to warn you about or you tell it to be noisy. You probably want to > add the -v option to the command line, which will have tarsnap report every > file > it archives. > >> 3). I've been running the backup every evening for almost a week now for >> about 6 -7 hours at a stretch, but there's no sign that it's getting near >> completion. Is there any way to get some kind of progress report on a backup >> using Tarsnap? Something like how much data has been backed up, how much >> remains to be backed up, that kind of thing. At present, I don't know if my >> backup will be completed tomorrow, next week or next year. It would be nice >> to have a backup status report. > > Tarsnap has no concept of "near completion" because it doesn't know how much > data you have until it finishes chewing through it. But if you use tarsnap's > --print-stats option then you'll be able to see how much data tarsnap has > archived when it exits. > >> 4). I'm trying to backup my home directory over several sessions, as I can't >> leave the computer running indefinitely. Therefore, I would expect to see a >> *.part archive after every backup session. At present, I would expect to see >> five *.part archives (from 29th March to 2nd April), but so far, can only >> see three (29th - 31st March). Can anyone suggest why the *.part archives >> from 1st and 2nd April are missing? > > How are you stopping Tarsnap? If you're using ^C then you'll lose progress > back > to the last checkpoint it created; hitting ^Q to tell tarsnap to exit cleanly > will ensure that it creates a truncated archive before it exits. -- The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
